Tag Archives: State Department

So many shoes have dropped on the matter of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s conduct and ethics she’s starting to resemble former Philippine first lady Imelda Marcos. No one else has as many shoes.

Now we find out, midway through the presidential campaign, that her family foundation was selling access to her while she was in charge at Foggy Bottom. Whether or not she actually did anything in exchange for the more than $100 million in contributions received – many coming from people ineligible to give to U.S. presidential campaigns – the point is clear: If you wanted access to the secretary you had to go through the foundation.

We’ve seen this kind of thing before, going back to the Arkansas days when Bill Clinton was the governor and she was busy at the Rose Law Firm. Everything with them is pay for play – even when there is no demonstrable pro quo to go along with the quid. Continue reading →

Back in July, Democratic presidential nominee and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “there is absolutely no connection between anything that I did as secretary of state and the Clinton Foundation.”

On Monday of this week, ABC’s Liz Kreutzer reminded people of that statement, as a new batch of emails reveal that there was a connection, and it was cash. As the emails, recovered by the public-interest law firm Judicial Watch, demonstrate, people who made donations to the Clinton Foundation got preferential treatment, and access, at the State Department when Hillary was Secretary of State:

The Abedin emails reveal that the longtime Clinton aide apparently served as a conduit between Clinton Foundation donors and Hillary Clinton while Clinton served as secretary of state. In more than a dozen email exchanges, Abedin provided expedited, direct access to Clinton for donors who had contributed from $25,000 to $10 million to the Clinton Foundation. Continue reading →

Conservative legal watchdogs have discovered new emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server dating back to the first days of her tenure as secretary of State.

The previously undisclosed February 2009 emails between Clinton from her then-chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, raise new questions about the scope of emails from Clinton’s early days in office that were not handed over to the State Department for recordkeeping and may have been lost entirely.

Clinton’s presidential campaign has previously claimed that the former top diplomat did not use her personal “clintonemail.com” account before March 2009, weeks after she was sworn in as secretary of State. Continue reading →

Hillary Clinton’s Super Tuesday victory gives her a clear path to the Democratic presidential nomination, but Bernie Sanders has never been her biggest obstacle to the White House. Her real liability is an email scandal that has put her in legal jeopardy.

Camp Clinton is arguing that the State Department’s Monday release of the final batch of emails ends the controversy over her private server. Yet that release is merely the end of one judicially mandated exercise overseen by a bureaucracy friendly to the former Secretary of State. The real action is in the courts, the FBI and Justice Department.

But even the friendly State Department review has been damaging. Of 30,000 emails Mrs. Clinton turned over to State, we now know that 2,093 were classified as “confidential” or “secret.” Another 22 were classified “top secret”—and State withheld their contents from public release. Mrs. Clinton keeps claiming these were “retroactively” classified, but that’s been vigorously disputed by intelligence community members, who note that at least some of the top-secret emails refer to intelligence projects classified from the beginning. Continue reading →

Every few days, another bombshell appears in the media illustrating just how poorly Hillary Clinton, during her tenure as our nation’s foreign policy boss, handled communications security. By now, we have a complex portrait of someone whose mishandling of our nation’s secrets, by herself and her staff, beggars belief for anyone versed in such matters. EmailGate isn’t going away, no matter how much Ms. Clinton’s supporters want it to.

The number of “unclassified” emails that turn out to be classified, some of which transited Ms. Clinton’s unencrypted server of bathroom fame, now surpasses 1,300 and may go higher still. A couple weeks ago I explained how Ms. Clinton’s emails included highly classified information from the National Security Agency, based on signals intelligence about Sudan at the Top Secret Codeword level (see this for an explanation of such classifications). How they got there has yet to be explained. Continue reading →

“It was not prohibited. It was not in any way disallowed. And as I have said and as now has come out, my predecessors did the same thing and many other people in the government.”
— Hillary Clinton

This is language that had previously earned Clinton Three Pinocchios. Clinton is relying on the fact that the legal requirement to immediately preserve emails from nongovernment email accounts was not made mandatory until nearly two years after she stepped down as secretary of state.

But that does not mean that when Clinton was secretary of state, there were not already in place State Department rules on how to handle emails and whether to use a personal email account. While Clinton says that “my predecessors did the same thing,” none had set up an exclusive and private email server for all of their departmental communications. (In fact, only Colin L. Powell has ever said he sent emails from a personal account, so Clinton’s use of plural is misleading.) Continue reading →

“Everything I did was permitted. There was no law. There was no regulation. There was nothing that did not give me the full authority to decide how I was going to communicate. Previous secretaries of state have said they did the same thing…. Everything I did was permitted by law and regulation. I had one device. When I mailed anybody in the government, it would go into the government system.”
— Former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton, interview with CNN, July 7, 2015

It’s been a while since we looked deeply at the controversy surrounding Clinton’s e-mails while she was secretary of state, but her recent statements to CNN provide a new opportunity.

In some ways, her remarks, when questioned on her “e-mail practices,” remind The Fact Checker of then-Vice President Al Gore’s statement in 1997 that there was “no controlling legal authority” concerning his phone calls from the White House seeking Democratic campaign contributions.

Here, Clinton claims that “everything I did was permitted” because “there was no law … there was no regulation.” So is that really the case? Continue reading →

March 10th was the one-year anniversary of Hillary Clinton’s mendacious United Nations press conference, at which she issued a string of assertions that have subsequently been proven false. Conservative group America Rising has released a damning compilation of her lies, spliced together with news reports systematically refuting each one. Watch:

In an interview with Hugh Hewitt on Thursday, the former CIA director said “the Pentagon acknowledges that they get attacked about 100,000 times a day.”

Hewitt asked Gates, “[A]re you surprised by the news that continues to come out about the former Secretary of State’s server and the fact that the intelligence community’s inspector general has said there was a lot of very highly classified information on her server?”

“Yeah, that’s a concern for me,” Gates said. “I never used email when I was head of CIA or head of the Department of Defense. Continue reading →

Imagine that you own a large department store called Foggy Bottom. Your most frequent customer is a superbly connected globetrotter with some one million miles on her passport. She never uses a standard shopping basket like everyone else. Instead, she strolls in with her own gigantic, custom-made, black-leather handbag.

Quite often when this 68-year-old grandmother visits Foggy Bottom, you catch her shoplifting. Indeed, you have pried 1,340 pilfered items that magically tumbled into her black bag.

How does she get away with it? Whenever you call the police, she gives them the same excuse:

“I did not take anything marked with a price tag.”

You keep wondering, “Why don’t the cops arrest her already?”

The authorities seem to accept her unprecedented justification. But everyone believes she knows better: Just because a sweater lacks a price tag doesn’t make it free of charge. Continue reading →

President Barack Obama’s friend William Ayers famously said he was “guilty as sin, free as a bird” after his acquittal on charges related to the Weather Underground, the domestic terrorism group he co-founded. The unrepentant Ayers and Hillary Clinton have that veneer of Teflon in common.

Were her last name anything other than Clinton, Hillary would be indicted today. Actually, she would have been indicted long ago and sitting in prison today. But her last name is Clinton. As such, she’s on the verge of becoming the nominee of the Democratic Party for president.

An investigation into possible mishandling of classified information on Hillary Clinton’s private email server has expanded to consider whether Clinton’s work as Secretary overlapped with her work for the Clinton Foundation run by her family.

Fox News‘ Catherine Herridge published the report, citing unnamed FBI sources, Monday morning. The report indicates the initial security referral looking into whether or not classified information was mishandled has expanded to look at possible public corruption involving the Clinton Foundation.

The report paints a picture of an internal struggle within the FBI over whether or not to prosecute Clinton. Herridge quotes an unnamed FBI source saying, “many previous public corruption cases have been made and successfully prosecuted with much less evidence than what is emerging in this investigation.” Continue reading →

It might be wise to pay your overdue income taxes before packing for that European river cruise.

A new enforcement provision passed by Congress and signed into law earlier this month allows the government to revoke the passports of seriously delinquent tax scofflaws — people who owe more than $50,000 to Uncle Sam.

“You could be on your honeymoon and they could revoke your passport,” said Tom Wheelwright, a certified public accountant and chief executive officer at ProVision Wealth Strategists in Tempe, Ariz.

Some details still need to be worked out, but the new passport rule indicates the government wants to get serious about collecting unpaid tax debts. The IRS reported 12.4 million delinquent accounts owing nearly $131 billion in assessed taxes, interest and penalties in 2014. Continue reading →

The State Department says it cannot find copies or backups of emails from the account of Bryan Pagliano, the State Department IT staffer who was paid by Hillary Clinton to maintain her private email server while she served as secretary of state.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley revealed the finding in a letter sent Friday to Sec. of State John Kerry which was obtained by Politico.

Grassley has considered granting immunity to Pagliano, who invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination during testimony in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi in September. Continue reading →

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